Chernobyl Plant

Ludmilla Thorne's article "No Peace for Chernobyl's Victims" (Commentary, April 29) misses an important point. The problem was not the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and is not the 15 other Chernobyl-type reactors in the former Soviet Union, however obsolete they may be. Grigori Medvedev's meticulous chronology ("The Truth About Chernobyl") showed that the disaster was not due to the reactor but to the damn fool people running the plant. The supervisor deliberately pushed the reactor to its limits to see what would happen, like a kid playing chicken on a trestle in front of an onrushing locomotive.

Chernobyl was shut down forever with the flip of a switch, shifting attention to needed repairs on the sarcophagus covering the nuclear plant's ruined reactor, which is leaking radiation 14 years after the world's worst nuclear accident. At a state ceremony in Kiev, the capital, President Leonid D. Kuchma gave the order to halt Chernobyl's last working reactor over a video linkup with the plant.

A Communist Party official revealed today that radiation exposure was still a problem at the damaged Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine and said three fatal accidents had occurred there this year. V. Lukyanenko, head of the party in the new town of Slavutich built to house Chernobyl staff, said directors of the power plant had been disciplined for security violations by plant personnel during the extraction of nuclear fuel.

Fourteen years after the world's worst nuclear accident sent plumes of radioactivity and shivers of fear across Europe, Ukraine announced Monday that it will close the entire Chernobyl nuclear plant in December. President Leonid D. Kuchma disclosed the plans to shut the facility, responsible for the deaths of at least 31 people and the poisoning of vast acres of farmland, with President Clinton at his side.

There is growing evidence that the damaged nuclear power plant at Chernobyl and others like it in the Soviet Union have been used for both civilian and military purposes. According to unofficial Soviet sources and Western nuclear officials, the Soviet military has a direct role in managing at least some of the 14 remaining reactors of the same design as the unit that exploded and burned at Chernobyl last April 26.

Soviet scientists say 106,000 people should be evacuated from their villages in Byelorussia due to contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, not 11,000 as the government recommends, the news agency Tass said. The cost of such a large resettlement would reach $15.6 billion, well beyond the financial capabilities of the republic just north of the power plant, which is in the Ukraine, the Byelorussian republic's legislature was told. The estimate exceeds the $12.

Chernobyl's children remember. Natasha Zheryubkina, 9, remembers "a kind of smoke" in the air and that the town "smelled of burning." Misha Telyatnikov, 10, remembers his mother rousing him and his brother, Oleg, 12, at 3:30 a.m. and telling them they were going to Kiev. "She didn't tell us why." It was Saturday, April 26, the day of the Chernobyl nuclear accident that has so far claimed 26 lives. The children were in their homes in Pripyat, two miles from the Chernobyl plant, when the No.

The U.S. Embassy on Saturday cautioned Americans living here that pregnant women and children should not drink local milk because a recent sample showed above-normal levels of radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, in which the death toll reportedly has risen to 17. The latest figure on fatalities came from a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, according to a report by United Press International.

A huge construction project is under way so that more than 25,000 families evacuated from around the devastated Chernobyl nuclear reactor can be given new homes elsewhere by fall, the newspaper Pravda reported Wednesday. The Communist Party daily paper also said that a new settlement for 10,000 Chernobyl workers is being built outside the evacuation zone.

Construction at the Soviet Union's ill-fated Chernobyl nuclear plant has been plagued for years by low morale, poor workmanship, persistent shortages of construction materials and deficiencies in quality control, according to an article published recently on the front page of an official Ukrainian newspaper. The article, a copy of which was obtained Thursday by The Times, raised the issues because of what its author, Liubov Kovalevska, called concern for safety.

The chief of Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power station, site of the world's worst civil nuclear accident, said Thursday that he plans to restart one of the plant's reactors next month. "Reconstruction work on Reactor No. 3 is completed," said Sergei Parashin, general director of the Chernobyl power station about 80 miles north of Kiev, the capital. "We plan to generate power into the national grid on May 5." Reactor No. 3--the only one of four reactors that has functioned since Chernobyl's No.

The ghosts of history's worst nuclear accident lurk everywhere in the pine forests and overgrown farmland that surround Chernobyl. Dozens of evacuated villages lie frozen in panic, house doors flung open. Vast fields serve as open graves for endless rows of radioactive trucks, tanks and helicopters used in the deadly cleanup 10 years ago.

The Ukrainian government will close the accident-plagued Chernobyl nuclear station by the year 2000 and replace it with a gas-fired power station, a visiting delegation of Western officials announced Thursday. "The new millennium will begin with a closed Chernobyl station," said a delighted Michel Barnier, France's environment minister, after hashing out the agreement in a two-hour meeting with Ukrainian President Leonid D.

Across the Continent, Europeans and others at two key sessions made it clear to Ukraine that it has little choice but to close the Chernobyl plant, scene of the world's worst nuclear accident eight years ago. In Vienna, delegates from more than 70 countries met Tuesday to discuss tough new nuclear safety measures that could force the closure of the Chernobyl power station.

Ludmilla Thorne's article "No Peace for Chernobyl's Victims" (Commentary, April 29) misses an important point. The problem was not the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and is not the 15 other Chernobyl-type reactors in the former Soviet Union, however obsolete they may be. Grigori Medvedev's meticulous chronology ("The Truth About Chernobyl") showed that the disaster was not due to the reactor but to the damn fool people running the plant. The supervisor deliberately pushed the reactor to its limits to see what would happen, like a kid playing chicken on a trestle in front of an onrushing locomotive.

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor plant, site of the world's worst nuclear accident and still a major source of electric power, will cease operations under an agreement struck between the United States and Ukraine, U.S. officials announced Saturday. Deputy Energy Secretary Bill White told reporters that a delegation from the U.S.

A leading Soviet scientist reported Sunday that "hundreds of thousands of people" have been screened for radiation sickness in the area around the site of last year's Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. Soviet researchers are closely studying the data, which will form the basis of a report to the United Nations on the various ramifications of the explosion in the power station, the scientist said. The statement was made by Leonid A.

Lawrence T. Papay, senior vice president of Southern California Edison Co., told an Irvine gathering Monday that the Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl could not happen in America "because of technical reasons and because our approach to safety is different." Papay, a nuclear engineer, was the luncheon speaker at a meeting of Town Hall of California at the Irvine Hilton and Towers hotel.

Fire broke out in an electrical generator of the Soviet nuclear plant at Chernobyl but it was quickly put out and there were no casualties, officials at the power station 80 miles north of Kiev said. "The fire has been put out . . . There are no casualties," said a recorded telephone message at the plant, scene of the world's worst nuclear reactor accident in 1986. Three other reactors at Chernobyl continued operating after the disaster, although some were shut down temporarily.

Lawmakers in the Ukraine voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to shut the Chernobyl power plant, site of the world's worst nuclear accident, as ethnic groups in the Soviet Union from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea pressed their demands on Moscow. In a sign of the new Kremlin attentiveness to the desires of increasingly combative local authorities, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev agreed with Russian Federation President Boris N.